How to shut up and listen

Stuck for the bumper Christmas gift? Try Robin Holloway’s collected essays of music criticism. It is impressively big and will take about five years to read if you listen to the music discussed at the same time. Since that includes most of Wagner and Strauss and plenty of Brahms, Bruckner and Mahler, you will have little time left over to indulge in snooker or bridge. No thanks, you smirk. A brick would do better as a door-stop. That was certainly the attitude of at least two major publishing houses, including Faber, when they turned the manuscript down.

Fools. They should have known better. This outstanding book, gathered to mark Holloway’s 60th birthday, is one of the most invigorating, elegantly written and passionate of its kind. Spurned and left homeless by the grandees, it has been taken in by a tiny independent publisher, Claridge Press, and dressed in a dry, sober jacket which gives little hint as to the trenchant and outrageous opinions contained within.